


Firsts

by eeveestho



Series: Yakulev Week 2014 [3]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: M/M, past Kuroo/Yaku
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-19
Updated: 2014-08-19
Packaged: 2018-02-13 20:05:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2163495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eeveestho/pseuds/eeveestho
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lev has a lot of firsts when it comes to Yaku.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Firsts

**Author's Note:**

> yakulev week - day 3: first time

The first time Yaku met Lev was when Lev walked into the school gym in the first week of his first year of high school. He scanned the gym full of volleyball players milling around and chatting. Everyone was tall but not as tall as him, he noted with satisfaction. Then his eyes fell upon a short player with short tousled brown hair in a Nekoma red jersey, laughing loudly at something one of the seniors was saying. He must be a first year like him, Lev thought, to be that short. But… why was he playing volleyball?? Surely he was no good at spiking or serving. He probably couldn’t even jump high enough to clear the net with his hands.

The boy tensed, sensing Lev’s gaze on him, and turned and looked at him. He smiled at Yaku and nodded as a way of greeting. Lev grinned back. He was a first year after all! He must recognize Lev. He did stick out in a crowd, after all… people tended to recognize him better than he recognized them. Maybe he was in his class?

Lev made his way over to the short first year and stuck his hand out for a handshake. “Hi, I’m Haiba Lev! I’m a first year!”

The boy blinked up at him in surprise, and then returned the handshake. His hand felt tiny in Lev’s. “Yaku Morisuke, third year libero,” he replied, his voice brimming with confidence.

“What, you’re a third year?!” Lev exclaimed, before he could stop himself. “But you’re so short!”

The seniors who were chattering nearby fell silent, and, as one, turned to look at Lev, with various expressions of horror and distress. There seemed to be a deafening silence, spreading outward from Lev and Yaku like ripples on a pond.

The short third year – Yaku, he said his name was – was smiling kindly when he introduced himself, but that smile quickly fell and was replaced by something much, much more sinister. He was still gripping Lev’s hand from the handshake, but his firm, pleasant grip had tightened just short of being painful. He wasn’t snarling, but he might as well have been, by the steely glint in his gaze. “You get that one free, first year.” There was nothing but ice but in his tone, and it chilled Lev down to his core. “Next time, I will literally kick your ass. Understand?”

He knew intuitively that it was not an empty threat. He nodded mutely, and then Yaku released his grip on Lev’s. He turned his back on Lev then, fully turned his back, and continued chatting to the other seniors as if nothing had happened.

A hand clapped him on his shoulder, making him start slightly with surprise, and he turned to see a lazy-eyed boy with a ridiculous hairstyle grinning wryly at him. “Welcome to Nekoma volleyball team, Lev.”

-

The first time Lev realized he had a crush on Yaku was after practice about a month later when they were doing stretches as part of their cool down. Kuroo had put on his iPod, as usual, and it was playing some somewhat downbeat music. He claimed to have a playlist specifically for cooling down, but it seemed to Lev to be completely random what they actually listened to. Sometimes it was a piano sonata, sometimes it was the hottest top 40 song, and sometimes, like now, it was a song from a musical. Lev vaguely recognized it from his mom’s music collection, but he didn’t know which one it was.

No one in the club seemed to mind Kuroo’s eclectic taste. In fact, it was only the first years, like Lev, who seemed at all phased when a new song came on the playlist and it was something completely different than what had been played before. The seniors merely continued stretching as directed, sometimes swaying to the music or humming quietly along.

Lev had gotten into the habit of glancing around when a new song started, to see everyone’s reaction. It was then, as they were stretching their left arm over their head to stretch out their obliques, that Lev noticed Yaku silently mouthing the words along to the song, his eyes peacefully shut, in his own world completely.

And, for the first time in his life, Lev felt a violent fluttering sensation in his belly that made him stop his stretching immediately because obviously he was doing something wrong. Maybe he had bent over too far, or something.

When he got home later, he described the symptoms to his oldest sister Natalia, who was a pediatrician, to see if she knew what he might be experiencing. Lev didn’t want to pull a muscle, after all. She, in turn, nearly pulled a muscle laughing at him, and, through her tears, told him that he had an acute crush.

Oh. A crush. Lev didn’t know… he was capable of that, to be honest. He had never had a crush in his life. He was in love with the idea of love, but he had simply never felt it. For a while in elementary school, he was convinced he had a crush on a different girl each month, because his friends told him a crush was “liking a girl more than you like other girls”. But an actual crush… no, Lev had never had that. He had just assumed that some day he would meet the girl of his dreams and she would sweep him off his feet, so to speak. Like he was a princess in a fairytale!

It turned out that his princess was actually a very short, very angry prince who would probably fall over if he tried to sweep Lev off his feet. And Lev was completely fine with that.

-

Lev had never ever ever ever asked someone out before. Ever. That time that his friends dared him to ask Sakano Haruko in middle school as a dare didn’t count. (Besides, she turned him down anyways.) He had no idea how it worked. He knew how it worked in theory: you liked someone, you told them this, if they liked you back you went and got food together, and you lived happily ever after. Or something.

According to the shoujo manga his sister Dina liked to read, there was essentially one tried and true way to ask your crush out: love letter in the shoebox. It was so simple, so elegant, so not reliant upon Lev having any courage whatsoever. It was perfect.

There was, however, the small matter of actually writing the letter. That was a whole new world in and of itself. What was he supposed to say? Was he supposed to confess in the letter, or was he supposed to wait until Yaku came to meet him after school? And if he wasn’t supposed to say it in the letter, was he supposed to hint at it? It seemed kind of a nasty shock to just put a vague letter about coming to meet your teammate after school and have it be a love confession. So he was supposed to… imply that he had a huge embarrassing crush on Yaku? Shit. Lev wasn’t good at subtlety.

After hours poring over his notebook and what must have been a small forest’s worth of crumpled paper balls in the trash, Lev stared down at his final letter.

Yaku,

I have something very important I need to talk to you about. Please meet me by the bike racks on Tuesday the 19th after school at 4 pm. Please come alone.

-Anonymous

He decided to forego subtlety and hinting altogether. He was really, really, really bad at it. He seemed to be only able to confess his undying affection or be completely cold and vague. He decided the latter was probably less embarrassing. And deciding to sign it anonymously was purely to ward off Yaku just coming over and just asking Lev what all the fuss was about.

Putting the locker in Yaku’s locker was another challenge. He didn’t want to be seen by anyone, especially not the third years who naturally had lockers near Yaku’s. With first years, Lev could convince or intimidate them into silence. The third years were a different story, especially the third years on the volleyball team, who weren’t intimidated by Lev’s stature in the slightest, and indeed seemed to take pleasure in teasing him and riling him up. And since the volleyball team almost always had morning practice, it was nearly impossible to come before them.

There was nothing to do but show up at 5:30am, an hour before volleyball practice started, with no chance no one would be anywhere near the school, to drop it off. He did slightly miscalculate, however, in assuming the school would actually be unlocked and open to the public at 5:30am. It wasn’t until 6am, when Kuroo came strolling along, whistling to himself and twirling a set of keys, that Lev could enter the school grounds. And even then, he only had keys to the school grounds and the volleyball gym.

“Why were you here so early?” Kuroo asked, as the two of them walked towards the gym in the crisp morning air.

“Um, no reason,” Lev lied, hoping his voice was airy and nonchalant. From the slightly startled stare Kuroo threw his way, he suspected he failed in that endeavour. “I actually forgot something in my shoe locker. My, uh, wallet. Do you happen to have keys to the school?”

“Nope.”

“Oh.”

After entering the gym and setting their bags down on the side, Lev helped Kuroo set up the equipment. As they were carrying out a rolled up net, Kuroo said, “So, you and Yaku seem to be getting along well, eh?”

Lev dropped the end of the net he was carrying. Kuroo stared, and after a moment, grinned at him like a cat who got the canary. “Oho ho?” he murmured to himself, as Lev scrambled to pick up his end of the net from the floor.

In the end, Lev got Kuroo to drop his letter off in Yaku’s shoebox surreptitiously, with the promise to show up at 6am every day for the next two weeks to help Kuroo set up the gym as payment for his silence.

A few days later, Lev stood by the bike racks, his clammy hands gripping one of the racks tightly, and reflected that this confession business was way too complicated. Surely it’d be easier to just walk up to someone and ask them out than to mess around with all of ridiculousness. First writing the letter, then dropping off the letter, then waiting for Yaku to show up… it was almost too much bother just to date someone.

Just as he was thinking this, Yaku rounded the corner and came into view, and the bloom of butterflies and warm honey in his stomach wiped all such protestations from his mind.

Yaku was staring at Lev as he came closer, his pointed face wrinkled slightly with confusion. He clearly wasn’t expecting someone he knew decently enough to call him anonymously out here to talk.

“Lev, did you send me that letter?” Yaku said, as soon as he was within earshot. Lev nodded, steeling his nerves and forcing himself to look Yaku squarely in the eyes and not look down at the ground between them. He couldn’t control his blush, though.

“Um, yeah, I did.”

The silence stretched out between them for a few seconds.

“Well?” Yaku prompted impatiently. “What did you want to talk about?”

“Oh,” Lev said. He hadn’t realized he had been staring silently at Yaku. “Right, that. Uh, well, I… I really like you Yaku! Like, a lot!”

Yaku blinked at him. He still looked confused and slightly irritated. Okay, clearly Lev needed to be more clear.

“I think you’re… really cool! And I really look up to you!”

No change in his expression whatsoever.

“And, um, I want to, y’know, hang out with you more….”

Did he have to say it outright? Did he really have to say it? Was there no other way?

“And I was wondering… if you wanted to like… go… have dinner with me sometime? Maybe?”

Some of the impatience cleared from Yaku’s face, but the confusion deepened. Shit, this wasn’t getting any better. Lev opened his mouth to speak again but Yaku beat him to it. “Lev, are you trying to ask me out on a date?”

“Y… yes.”

The silence this time was torture, and Lev was much, much, much too aware of it. Every second that passed seemed to add more weight on his very soul, prolonging his suffering. Just reject him and get it over with, he begged Yaku silently. Don’t torture him like this. Don’t let him hope.

“Sure, I’d love to,” Yaku said, his stern face breaking into a small smile. “How does Friday at 7 sound? That’s our next rest day. Do you want to meet up at the fountain by the station for… dinner and a movie, let’s say?”

“Y-yes! That sounds good! Thank you! Yes! Okay!” Lev blurted out, way too loudly. His mouth was moving, he was faintly aware, but he didn’t really know what was coming out of it.

“Cool. I’m picking the movie. See you then,” Yaku said with a grin, and then, sticking his hands in his pockets, turned around and left Lev standing there, his heart hammering, wondering if that had really just happened. Just to be sure, he gave his arm a little pinch. Yaku’s back continued to shrink as the pain welled there, and he let out a huge breath that he hadn’t known he was holding.

He said yes. Yaku said yes. Yaku said yes to a date with Lev. He said yes.

Lev couldn’t help himself: he punched the air and let out the quietest whoop he dared make, with Yaku not more than 20 meters away. He jumped up and down, squealing quietly to himself, pumping his hands up and down, overcome with euphoria. He said yes! He had a date with Yaku! He was going on a date!!

…Wait. How did those work, exactly…?

-

The fountain was a popular meeting spot, Lev noted as he walked towards it. Lots of teenagers fiddling on their phones sat around the edges of it, and a few salarymen sat on the benches off to the side, glancing at their watches every five seconds. He pulled out his own phone to look at the time. 6:14. Maybe he had been a bit overenthusiastic and overly cautious in coming to the date on time. This was the first date he had ever been on, but he had a feeling showing up 45 minutes early for it was a bit… overeager.

With a sigh, he sat down on a vacated bench. Might as well get comfy. He was lucky that it wasn’t too stiflingly hot out today. He would be waiting for awhile outside, and he didn’t want to show up to the date covered in sweat.

However, about 10 minutes later, as he was watching the various people walk past the busy meeting spot, he spotted a familiar short figure coming out of the train station. He stood up as Yaku got closer, and the two grinned at each other wryly.

“Well, now I don’t feel as embarrassed for showing up so early,” Yaku joked as he came to a stop in front of Lev, stuffing his hands in his pockets. “How early did you show up, anyways?”

Lev let out a laugh. “10 minutes ago?”

“Jeez. There’s a limit to punctuality, Lev.”

“Well if I hadn’t showed up, you would have to wait for me,” he pointed out. “That’s just bad manners, isn’t it?”

Yaku’s grin melted into something a little softer. “Yeah, true. You did ask me out, after all.”

They started walking towards the theatre, and Yaku started complaining about transit and how he ended up sitting beside an old man reading smutty manga on his tablet – “Porn, Lev! I thought old people couldn’t even figure out how the internet worked, never mind how to look at porn on it!” – and Lev just grinned down at him, basking in Yaku’s presence.

He had worried about the date so much, stared at his outfit in the mirror until he couldn’t even recognize his own reflection anymore, but this was… easy. Walking with Yaku, making dumb jokes, laughing together. Yes, his stomach was still full of those infernal butterflies (did those ever go away??), but it was like when he was watching a scary movie and his mom draped a blanket over his shoulders: he was scared, and there was a big part of him screaming that he was going to die horribly soon, but he knew it was gonna be okay.

Of course, when they did actually end up going to see a horror movie approximately 30 minutes later, there was no mother to drape a blanket over his shoulders. There was nothing but a 20 foot screen with gruesome murder scenes splashed across it and Yaku sitting beside him grinning maniacally at the spectacle.

“Yaku, can I hold your hand?” Lev hissed in the dark of the theatre, staring transfixed at the screen.

He turned to look at him skeptically. “Normally you just, y’know, go for it,” Yaku murmured in reply.

“This isn’t a date thing, this is an I’m-terrified-and-am-gonna-scream-if-someone-doesn’t-calm-me-down thing!!” he hissed shrilly, looking at Yaku with wide, horrified eyes.

Yaku let out a soft laugh and reached out for Lev’s hand, gripping the end of the armrest with white knuckles, and interlaced their fingers together. “Okay. But only if you say it’s not a date thing,” Yaku muttered quietly. “You big baby.”

It turned out that Yaku’s fingers were even better than a blanket from his mom. His nerves were electrified, but now it was more of a pleasant hum than a crackly dangerous electricity. He could feel Yaku’s heartbeat, rhythmic and steady, against his erratic pounding one.

“It might be a bit of a date thing,” Lev said quietly, a few minutes later, tensing his fingers against Yaku’s for a moment.

He scoffed quietly beside him, but didn’t let go of Lev’s hand.

Hours later, after they had eaten some bad fast food (Lev had sorely overestimated how much money he had to spend on a date and couldn’t afford much more, and refused to have Yaku pay for dinner), they walked to the station together. Lev lived a few blocks away from the station, where Yaku lived two stations away. This was to be where they parted ways for the night.

“Thank you for agreeing to go out with me tonight,” Lev said, somewhat awkwardly. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do here.

From the way Yaku raised his eyebrows and let out a short bark of laughter, he suspected that was not it. “No problem. Thank you for asking me out, I enjoyed myself.”

“Yeah?” Lev said hopefully.

“Yeah.”

There was a short pause in which the two of them stared at the other expectantly. Lev was waiting for Yaku to say goodbye and go catch his train or something. He didn’t know what Yaku was waiting for. He wished absently that he could read Yaku’s silent stares better, because there sure seemed to be a lot of them in his life lately.

And just like all the other silent Yaku stares, this one was cleared up by Yaku himself. “So, did you want to… do something like this again sometime?”

“Oh!” Ah, that’s what the stare meant. “Yes. Yes I would. That would be cool.”

Yaku smirked at some joke Lev didn’t get, and with a nod said, “Okay… cool.” And with a smile and wave, he turned around and walked towards the station.

Lev watched until Yaku’s body slipped around the corner of the station, and then turned and walked towards his own house, a spring in his step at the thought of another date promised in the future.

As he walked up the front steps of his house a few minutes later, he was struck with the thought that maybe what Yaku was waiting for wasn’t an invitation for another date. Maybe… it was a kiss.

He didn’t sleep that night, consumed with the possibility and with the mental image of Yaku’s soft, slightly parted lips, curved in that irresistible smile of his.

-

Lev thought a lot over the next few weeks about Yaku’s lips. In class, on the walk home, during volleyball practice, as he laid in bed at night… There were few moments of Lev’s life that weren’t spent, at least tangentially, thinking about Yaku’s lips. What they would feel like. What they would… taste like? Would he be able to taste them with a kiss? The harlequin romances he had stolen from his sister Ivanya when he was younger said so, but he didn’t really see how.

He had never kissed anyone before. Well, he had never kissed anyone who wasn’t his relative before. He didn’t think that counted, somehow. He wondered if Yaku had ever kissed anyone before.

“Have you ever kissed anyone before?” he blurted out one day, as the two of them were walking to Lev’s house together after practice. They were going to “hang out”, which Lev sincerely hoped was a code for something other than studying and watching movies. They had “hung out” a few times before and it had never evolved beyond that.

Yaku looked at him with raised eyebrows, surprised at the sudden question. “Uh, yeah.”

“Oh.”

Of course he had. He was so much older and cooler and more experienced than Lev, he knew that. But he had hoped… somehow… It was stupid, to expect Yaku to not kiss anyone. Besides, it’s not like it mattered who he had kissed.

“Who?” Lev really needed to work on his verbal filter

He looked at Lev for a moment quietly, almost appraisingly. Lev looked away. He felt like Yaku could see right through him, see why he was asking. “I dated Kuroo for a bit in first year,” he replied after a moment, huffing out a slight sigh.

“Kuroo?! Like, our captain?!”

“Do you know any other Kuroos?” Yaku snapped. “Yeah, we dated for like… 4 months? But decided we were better off as friends. And we obviously kissed during that time.”

4 months. Lev did some quick mental math. It had been about 3 weeks since their first date… they had gone on 2-ish dates since then. (He didn’t think going over to Lev’s house to watch movies counted as a date. He could be wrong.) He wondered at what point in that 4 month relationship Kuroo and Yaku kissed.

Ugh. Kuroo and Yaku kissed. He wasn’t even jealous so much as he was faintly grossed out. It was like walking in on your mom and dad making out in the kitchen when all you wanted was to get a glass of juice.

…It was faintly worrying, Lev noted, that he thought of Yaku as a parental figure, but that was an issue for another day…

“Stop thinking so hard, you’re gonna pull a muscle,” Yaku muttered beside him. “It was years ago, there’s nothing to be jealous about.”

“I’m not jealous,” Lev replied, honestly.

Yaku turned to look at Lev, his nose scrunched up a bit. He gave Lev one of those inscrutable silent stares, but then turned away a moment later to look forward again. The rest of the walk to Lev’s house was spent in vaguely uncomfortable silence, with Lev distinctly feeling like he had taken a wrong turn somewhere in that conversation.

Once they had settled into Lev’s room with some pop and cookies, Yaku picked out an action movie from Lev’s collection and turned it on. The two of them sat at the table, watching the movie and making attempts at their homework. It was just like every other time they hung out at his house, to Lev’s disappointment.

And just like every other time they hung out at Lev’s house, he spent the majority of it overanalyzing everything Yaku did. He wasn’t paying much attention to the movie today. He kept glancing over at Lev, with a blank curious expression on his face. Was he interested in what Lev thought of the movie, perhaps?? …Or maybe he just noticed Lev staring at Yaku, not paying attention to the movie or his homework. Yeah, that seemed more likely.

He really didn’t know how all of this worked. Yaku said that he and Kuroo dated for 4 months. At what point, he wondered, did it change from “going on dates” to “dating”? Were they the same thing? Were he and Yaku dating? How the hell did people figure this stuff out??

“Yaku,” he found himself saying suddenly, his verbal filter failing him once again, “Are we dating?”

Yaku looked over at him with a strange expression. He had way too many of those. He would stare silently at Lev for like 15 seconds and it would be super uncomfortable and then he would say something cryptic that Lev would spent the next week thinking about.

He decided to cut him off before he had a chance to do that. “I mean,” he continued, “We hang out all the time, and we go on dates sometimes, and I really like you, and I think you like me too? So, um… are we dating, or…?”

His expression, whatever it was, twitched into a smile. “Do you want to be dating?”

“Yes,” Lev replied instantly.

“Me too. So, we’re dating.”

“Oh. Okay. Cool.”

Yaku nodded a bit and returned to his homework, smiling faintly at it. He glanced up a moment later, Lev still staring at him, not really sure what just happened.

“Lev, is there something else you wanted to ask me?” he asked, his tone calm and patient. That faint smile still lingered on his face.

If they were dating, that meant…

“Oh my god, you’re hopeless,” Yaku muttered quietly, and then, as if it was the easiest thing in the world, leant forward and kissed Lev.

At some point, he pulled away and returned to his homework. And then some more time passed and Yaku went home, and Lev had dinner, and got into bed. But all of it blurred together in his mind into a mass of inconsequentiality. All he could think about, all he could feel, all he could taste, was Yaku’s lips. And how he could get them on his again.

-

Like the first time he realized he had a crush on Yaku, the first time Lev realized he was in love with Yaku was at volleyball practice, and also seemed to happen at a completely random moment.

They were practicing their receives, and Yaku had been partnered with Lev again. Yaku said it was because Lev was awful at receives and Yaku, as the libero, was naturally the best. Lev wasn’t so convinced. Sometimes he felt a gaze on the back of his head and turned around to see Kuroo staring at him, wearing that same self-satisfied smirk that he had bared at Lev when Lev had asked him to drop off his love note in Yaku’s locker months ago.

Yaku was giving him pointers on how to receive better – move his body, not just his arms; anticipate the ball’s path in the air; improve his form of his arms so the ball didn’t ricochet – the same thing he told Lev every time they practiced receives. But no matter how much he told him, Lev’s body just didn’t listen. It was too long, too gangly, to be coordinated like Yaku’s. Yaku was pure streamlined efficiency, pure power and skill packed into every inch. In comparison, Lev felt like one of those wiggly tube men that furniture stores put outside their stores to drum up business.

It didn’t help, of course, that the attack was coming from his boyfriend, who looked really attractive when he spiked the ball towards Lev. Like, damn. He didn’t get to see Yaku on the attack very much, but it suited him very well.

Today though, for once his long limbs and his infatuated mind cooperated. He saw the ball moving in the air, curving slightly to his right; his arms came together in perfect receiving position; he moved his entire body to receive the spike. He returned the spiked ball neatly to Yaku, who caught it easily in the air.

Both of them stared at each other, in disbelief that that had actually just happened. Then, after a beat of stunned silence, both of them let out a whoop of victory.

“I did it!” Lev yelled triumphantly.

“You did it!” Yaku hollered back. He was beaming at Lev like a thousand watt bulb, like pure sunlight. Lev could feel the pride pouring off him in waves, like a warm summer breeze.

And it was in that moment that Lev realized that he was completely in love with Yaku.

Luckily, practice ended a few moments later, and Yaku had to head home immediately for some family commitment, leaving Lev standing there in his jersey and shorts, stunned at his own realization.

Stupidly, the first thing he thought of was a line from one of his favourite romantic comedies, one of the many that Yaku refused steadfastly to watch with him. That line that always perplexed him, until now. “At that moment I knew. I knew the way you know about a good melon.”

Ah. That’s what she meant.

-

Strangely, telling Yaku he loved him was easier than anything else so far, even though it was just as new as everything else. Easier than kissing him, easier than trying to figure out his strange inscrutable stares, leagues easier than trying to asking Yaku out. If there was one thing Lev was good at, it was being too honest, having his mouth run away from his brain.

And as they sat on a park bench, eating ice cream cones and laughing about some stupid joke, Lev just looked over, looked at Yaku, opened his mouth, and let the truth pour out.

Yaku turned as red as the cherry ice cream Lev was eating. He whipped his head around to stare at Lev, his eyes wide with alarm. “W-what?”

“I said I love you, Yaku,” Lev said, grinning earnestly.

He stared at him, pink-cheeked. His face was easy to read now. It was pure, unadulterated panic and fear.

“You don’t have to say it back if you don’t love me yet,” Lev said with a shrug, licking at his ice cream cone. “I just wanted to tell you that I did.”

“No, I um…” Yaku’s voice was soft now, softer than Lev was used to hearing it. “I just… no one’s ever told me they loved me before.”

It was Lev’s turn to raise his eyebrows for once. “I thought you dated Kuroo?”

Yaku let out a scoff, looking away from Lev. “We fooled around a bit – made out in his room a lot – but it wasn’t love. At least, not romantic love.”

“Hmm. Well, I love you.” Lev licked at his ice cream again. “I’ll tell you a lot, so you don’t forget. Okay, Yaku?”

He smiled softly up at Lev. “Yeah, okay.” After a short pause, he blurted out, “I mean, I don’t know… if I love you. I don’t know what love is.”

“You just know,” Lev said wisely. “The way you know about a good melon.”

Yaku’s soft, vulnerable expression melted away into something more sarcastic and familiar. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? ‘Like a good melon’. Am I a fruit or a person??”

Lev laughed a bit and squeezed Yaku’s hand, held fast in his. For once, he was ahead of Yaku on this one. It was the first time he beat Yaku in something, and had a feeling it wouldn’t be the last.


End file.
